Edited by GARY ARLINGTON (The San Francisco Comic Book Company; 1971)

Continuing my exploration of the underground comix of the 1960s and 70s, here’s THRILLING MURDER COMICS, a one-off anthology in which all the usual suspects—S. Clay Wilson, R. Crumb, Spain, Kim Deitch, etc.—turned away from their standard choice of subject matter (sex and drugs) to focus on a new taboo: murder, contained in a mock-noir format.  The editor and publisher was the late Gary Arlington (1938-2014), of the fabled San Francisco Comic Book Company.  THRILLING MURDER COMICS isn’t the best of Arlington’s publications, but hits all its bases, being ugly and offensive to a fault.

The book certainly starts with a bang, in the form of “Kid Kill!,” written and illustrated by the “Armageddon Man of Underground Comix” Jim Osborne.  Its protagonist is Mr. Osbourne himself, a deranged comic book artist whose inner demons, in the form of a conjoined critter named Ignatz who really hates infants, take literal form.  Osborne’s art is notable for its loving depictions of bloodletting and exposed innards, rendered more often than not in splashes of bright red in an otherwise black-and-white aesthetic.  Osborne also contributes “The Loser: A Short Tale of a Small man,” about an embittered shoe salesman contemplating suicide who finds himself in an even worse situation when the gun with which he aims to end his life goes off accidentally.

“A Fine Way to Die” was drafted by Bill Griffith, and headlined by his recurring personage Mr. The Toad, the “world’s most perfectly obnoxious man.”  Mr. The Toad serves to send up the comix movement’s major bugaboo: the straight world, in which The Toad is an uptight rapist and murderer.  I found the tale more interesting for its incidental details (such as a cat who in place of “meow” emits “Mao”) than its nonsensical narrative.

R. Crumb gives us “Jumpin’ Jack Flash!,” which provides an early depiction of Crumb’s fascination with Biblical subject matter (the apotheosis of which was 2009’s Crumb-drafted BOOK OF GENESIS), and also his misogynistic streak.  It pivots on a hippie messiah who preaches peace and love (and sex!), but ends up seeing his teachings perverted by his all-female congregation, who end up enthusiastically massacring each other—which apparently “proves once again that women are no damn good!”

“At Any Given Moment, a Chicken Bites the Dust,” created by Kim Deitch (as “Volney A. Litnov”), is a perverted four-pager involving mutilated chickens, unnatural sex and (of course) murder, of both the criminal and state-sanctioned variety.  Finally there’s Spain’s “In the Gloom of Night,” a bombastic gangster pastiche whose major selling point is, once again, its graphic depictions of murder.

Rounding out the package are a couple jam-packed full page drawings by Wilson, which are filled with disgusting X-rated detail that requires a very close perusal to be fully deciphered.  And we mustn’t forget the back cover illustration, which (like the front) was drafted by Kim Deitch’s late brother Simon, who offers a bold depiction of a guy getting strangled to death.